The Discipline and I

Extract

Having had no previous experience in giving presidential addresses, I spent most of the last year on a study of such addresses, delivered before our own and other scholarly associations. The conclusion of my research was that most of those addresses could be readily classified under one of two headings. The subject matter was either “The Discipline and I” or “The Discipline, Its Past, Present, and Future.“ Faced with this alternative, I found the choice between being either frankly egotistic or grandly universalistic rather hard. Although naturally leaning toward the former, I could not quite suppress my interest in the latter. Finally, I resolved my doubts by recalling the well-known proposition that since chocolate is good and oysters are good, chocolate and oysters together must be excellent indeed. What this means is that I should like to make a number of remarks—some anticritical, but some also self-critical—about my approach to the industrial development of Europe in the nineteenth century; but in doing so I shall select those aspects of the matter which have more general significance and try to connect them with some methodological observations.